Who Had the Upper Hand? Ranking Participants of Interactions Based on Their Relative Power
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Ajita John, Dorée Duncan Seligmann · International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing · 2013
In this paper, we present an automatic system to rank participants of an interaction in terms of their relative power. We find several linguistic and structural features to be effective in predicting these rankings. We conduct our study in the domain of political debates, specifically the 2012 Republican presidential primary debates. Our dataset includes textual transcripts of 20 debates with 4-9 candidates as participants per debate. We model the power index of each candidate in terms of their relative poll standings in the state and national polls. We find that the candidates’ power indices affect the way they interact with others and the way others interact with them. We obtained encouraging results in our experiments and we expect these findings to carry across to other genres of multi-party conversations.